


A Rose's Rarest Essence

by zjofierose



Series: Zjo's zine fics [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Language of Flowers, M/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 09:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23968930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: ~ A rose's rarest essencelives in the thorn. - Rumi---The last time Shiro saw Keith's skin, it was mostly bare, only showing the one or two Life Flowers that most teenagers would have, indicating transformative life events they'd experienced. Now... now Keith's skin is covered, and every flower has a story to tell...
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: Zjo's zine fics [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1503608
Comments: 12
Kudos: 167
Collections: Star-Crossed: Sheith Soulmate Zine 2020





	A Rose's Rarest Essence

**Author's Note:**

> A fic I was very privileged to write for Starcrossed: A Sheith Soulmate Zine. A little sad, but with a happy ending! Download this incredible zine [here!](https://sheithsoulmatezine.tumblr.com)
> 
> Many thanks to @the_deep_magic and probably some other folks for the beta feedback! (it's been a month or two, I can't remember who looked at it, I'm sorry!!)

“Ready?” 

Keith sinks lower in his stance, and Shiro smiles. He can’t remember the last time they’ve had a chance to do this, just the two of them, no onlookers or well-meaning friends in attendance. Just them, late at night, on the Atlas’ training deck.

“Always,” Shiro answers, and Keith gives that sharp, fierce grin of his half a second before he lunges.

Shiro dances out of his way, and they’re off, leaping and thrusting, dodging and parrying. It’s exhilarating to fight with Keith, and Shiro can’t help but compare it to the way they used to spar at the Garrison, late at night or early in the morning, just them and the vast expanse of an empty gym. It feels like a hundred years ago, but Shiro will never forget the unexpected swiftness or the precise attacks of a much smaller Keith, always underestimated, always counted out, but never defeated. 

“One,” Keith laughs, his hands pinning Shiro’s wrists as his legs wrap around Shiro’s body in an unbreakable bind. “Do you yield?”

Shiro twists underneath him; it’s mostly for show, there’s no way he can break the hold and he knows it, but it’s always fun to try. Keith just snorts, gripping Shiro’s wrists harder as a corner of his shirt rides up, revealing… Shiro squints. There’s a large, dark spray of flowers across Keith’s side that didn’t used to be there, purple-black against his pale skin. 

“I yield,” Shiro says without thinking, his eyes caught on the unsettling depth of the color that then disappears as Keith releases him and leans back, the fabric of his shirt falling to cover the bared skin. He stands, then reaches down a hand to pull Shiro up.

“Again?” Keith asks, and Shiro nods vigorously, ignoring the offered hand and popping to his feet to settle into his preparatory stance.

“Yeah.”

\--

Shiro’s first flowers appear when he’s six, white trumpet lilies blooming across his very small abdomen. _Innocence, purity_ , his mother says, rubbing at them when he cries with the pain of their appearance. It takes three hours before they’re complete, a single, large anemone blooming at their root. His mother doesn’t speak a meaning for that one, but rather runs her fingers across it and schedules a doctor’s appointment for the morning. 

He’ll learn later that it stands for sickness, for terminal conditions; a beautifully colored harbinger of his illness to come. 

He’s eleven and sitting on a couch when he feels the same searing pain spreading across his chest, burning like needles driving into his skin. He runs to the bathroom and rips off his shirt, the orange shapes of marigolds already spreading in an arced garland from shoulder to shoulder, following the gentle curve of his collarbones. He’s read the lists like anyone else, memorized the meanings of soulmarks, knows that they only appear at significant moments of one’s life. He watches as his face goes pale, reaching up to trace a shaking finger along the edge of a bright yellow petal. _Grief_ , he thinks, _mourning_ . _Death_. 

Not his, as it turns out - rather, his parents’, killed in a car crash. He waits until all of the rest of the mourners have left, then places a single marigold plant at the foot of his parents’ headstone and lets his grandfather lead him away. 

—

Keith flows at him across the mats, slipping easily from style to style, and Shiro follows his lead. They trade blows and strikes, feints and punches. Moving with Keith like this is one of the only times that Shiro feels truly comfortable in his body, in this created vessel which is only his through right of occupation. _Squatters’ rights_ , he thinks, late at night and staring at the gleam of the emergency lights on his powered-down arm. Kuron’s memories are his now, but his thread of consciousness winds through his time in the abyss, and while consciously Shiro knows that Kuron was gone before he took possession of this mortal form, he can’t help but feel like an intruder in his own skin. 

Shiro breathes, letting the breath flow through him and in him, focusing his energy for a series of sharp, fast hits that leave Keith on the mats beneath him, Shiro’s bulk strategically placed to keep Keith down. They’re both breathing heavily, but Shiro doesn’t give an inch. He can feel Keith’s muscles tense under his hands and body, working his way through any possible escapes. 

Finally Keith lets himself sag against the mat. “I yield,” he chuckles, and Shiro bends down to wipe the sweat off his face onto the back of Keith’s long-sleeved shirt, rolling out of the way as Keith splutters in feigned indignation. 

“Wipe your face on your own clothes,” Keith grumbles, no heat in it as he rubs a sleeve across his face. Shiro just grins. 

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asks, and Keith sticks out a tongue. Shiro watches him for a moment, takes in the flush that rides bright along his cheekbones. “Aren’t you hot?”

Keith shrugs, and Shiro notices the awkward hitch of his shoulders. He’s clearly sweating, and Shiro can’t remember him ever sparring in long sleeves before - on the castleship and the Atlas they’d often be in uniform, of course, or the undersuits. Actually, now that Shiro thinks about it, he hasn’t seen Keith shirtless since he’s come back from the void, and he hasn’t seen him in short sleeves since the end of the war. 

“I dunno, Shiro, _am_ I?” Keith asks, and his tone is teasing, but Shiro can feel himself flush.

“Yeah, yeah,” he laughs, then lunges at Keith, diving for his ankles as Keith leaps out of the way.

\---

Shiro doesn’t bloom any more flowers until well after he meets Adam. He somewhat expects that he will, thinks that he _should_ , especially given how quickly they get serious, but it’s not till he’s unpacking his clothes into the cleared-out half of Adam’s closet that he feels the now-familiar stabbing pain on the inside of his left arm. He breathes calmly and waits for it to pass, then wanders into the bathroom to view the damage.

The blooms are uncommon enough that he doesn’t recognize the shapes of either of the flowers now bursting across his skin; they’re twined together, one yellow and one pink, and he examines them closely, making a careful mental picture so that he can research them later. 

He finishes hanging his clothes and stowing the rest of his possessions before curiosity gets the better of him and he goes to his padd to pull up some references. A hollyhock is what he identifies first, the big, slightly garish, pink one - _ambition_ , he reads, and frowns. Maybe it doesn’t have to do with Adam after all? The next one is a little easier, but the meaning listed for yellow carnations isn’t any more clarifying or reassuring, if he’s honest. _Ambition and disappointment,_ he thinks, _or rejection_. It doesn’t make any sense - his career is right on track; his health is, well, managed, anyway; he’s just moved in with his serious boyfriend. Everything is going really well. 

Shiro closes the references and dismisses them from his mind. The whole business of flower prognostication is inexact anyway. Maybe these ones don’t mean anything after all. Maybe they’re just... pretty.

\---

Shiro pulls off his shirt without ceremony, followed by his pants, and turns the shower on hot. He can hear Keith rustling around behind him, banging around the locker room closet looking for spare towels. 

The light catches a flash of blue, and Shiro looks down at the last flowers he’s ever bloomed. They run from knee to hip, and he doesn’t quite know how to parse the fact that Kuron had all his same soulmarks, too. Clone tech, he supposes, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird. He steps under the faucet and lets the hot water rinse over the large rhododendrons that span his thighs, interspersed with delicate forget-me-nots. 

They’d bloomed the night he’d received the official Kerberos assignment, the pain of their appearance pulling him down from the effortless, floating high he’d felt at the news. He’d looked them up, read _remember me_ and _danger, beware_ , and rolled his eyes. Fate couldn’t ever give him something _nice_ , he supposed, just half-assed warnings and harbingers of doom traced across his failing form in beautiful leaves and petals. 

_Who cares,_ he thought, and updated his will. Nothing was going to keep him from this mission.

\--

Shiro finishes his shower quickly and towels off, pulling on a clean set of sweatpants and a shirt before walking back to see if Keith’s about done. He’s loose, resting in the mindless zen state that comes over him after a good workout. It’s what he blames for how he doesn’t even realize what he’s seeing until he’s staring right at Keith’s bare back, running with water where he stands under the shower, his black hair stuck to the curve of his neck.

Or rather, Shiro realizes with what feels like agonizing slowness, Keith’s not-at-all bare back. 

When Shiro had last seen Keith naked, it had been in the Garrison showers along with the other two hundred and some cadets and officers, and Keith had had two soul marks: a small aloe that grew pale green over his solar plexus, and matching sprays of red poppies on both forearms. Two was a relatively average number of soul marks for a teenager to have, and Shiro had never thought much of it. 

Keith had never specified the situations in which his soulmarks had appeared, but given what Shiro came to know of his history, he had felt confident in his assumptions that the aloe ( _affection, grief_ ) was from the loss of his mother, and the poppies ( _consolation, remembrance_ ) were from the loss of his father. Shiro would absently touch his own marigolds at the sight of them, and then put the whole business out of his mind altogether.

Now, though - Shiro stares as the water traces the outlines of Keith’s form, coursing over leaves and blossoms, darkening the colors of branches and flowers in full bloom. Begonias rising from his feet to cover his calves ( _beware, dark thoughts_ , Shiro remembers); heliotrope’s _eternal love_ mingled with purple hyacinth’s message of _unending sorrow_ covering Keith’s glutes and quads, up over onto the curve of his tailbone.

Keith’s back is a mess of glowing white edelweiss ( _courage, devotion_ ) and lurid yellow daffodils ( _unequaled love_ ) that makes Shiro bite his lip, and he must make some sort of noise, because Keith turns, eyes wide, and suddenly all Shiro can see are the huge, dark, crimson roses that cover his entire torso. 

Keith slaps at the faucet and dives for his towel, wrapping it around as much of himself as he can, and Shiro’s hurt that he feels so wrong-footed, that there’s any part of Keith that Keith doesn’t want him to see. 

Still. 

“Mourning?” he asks softly, and Keith’s face shutters. 

“Don’t ask things you won’t like the answer to, Shiro,” he says, and starts to push past, but Shiro blocks his path. Keith could get past if he really wanted to, they both know it, but Keith stops where he is, head hanging, gaze fixed firmly on the water he’s currently dripping onto the floor. 

Shiro doesn’t want to have to ask, isn’t even sure that he wants to know, but he can’t help himself, can’t _ever_ help himself where Keith’s concerned, it seems. 

He keeps his voice gentle, pitches it like he did when Keith was fifteen and angry, nineteen and lost, twenty-three and fighting an intergalactic war. 

“Why do you have so many marks, Keith?” 

Keith exhales hard, then rips off the towel and lifts his chin, staring Shiro down the way Keith stares down anyone and anything he’s going to conquer. He turns his back, but never breaks their gaze.

“These,” he says shortly, pointing to the daffodils and edelweiss, “were from the day you left for Kerberos.” His voice is stiff and blunt, like he’s reciting anatomy or flight trajectories. “These,” he gestures to the hyacinths that curve around his thighs, “showed up the day before they declared you lost. The begonias,” he points, “were what appeared after I was kicked out of the Garrison and going crazy in the desert.” 

Keith shivers, whether from cold or nerves it’s unclear, and Shiro can feel his fists clenched so hard his nails are digging into his palms. “The heliotrope,” Keith laughs hopelessly, and Shiro wants to cradle him in his arms, wants to protect him from ever sounding so sad again, “is what kept me awake the whole first night you were back. And these?” He turns back around to face Shiro, waves a hand at his torso, at the huge, beautiful, dark red roses that cover it. The gesture draws Shiro’s eyes to the tiny forget-me-nots that flash in between the poppies on Keith’s forearms, a perfect complement to the ones that wink between the rhododendrons on his own thighs. 

Keith flicks a rose that blooms across his ribs. “I get another one of these giant fuckers each time I think I’ve lost you.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’m about out of room, though, Shiro, so make an effort, yeah?”

“ _Keith-_ ” Shiro breathes, and Keith’s whole face crumbles. He whips the towel back around himself and shoves past Shiro to the benches, dragging his clean clothes on and scrubbing at his hair like it’s offended him. “Keith, why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

“Tell you what, Shiro? That every mark on my body since I was fifteen is from you? That everything I feel for you - everything I’ve _ever_ felt for you - is inked onto my skin by fucking Fate herself?” Keith snorts. “Yeah, I can’t imagine why I didn’t bring that up.”

Shiro is so focused on trying to figure out what to say, how to process any small portion of the shock that’s freezing his brain, that he almost doesn’t notice the burning in his palm. Then Keith drops the towel, his eyes wide and upset, raising his hand in front of his face with a look of total disbelief, and Shiro notices the telltale pain in his own palm. 

It appears faster than any of the rest of his flowers, and Shiro wonders if it understands the urgency of the moment; if his body, or the fates, or whatever universal power it is that controls these things knows, somehow, that they’re on a precipice and afraid to breathe.

“Keith,” he says again, stepping forward and holding out his hand. There, in the center of his palm, is a perfectly formed blue violet.

“Shiro,” Keith’s voice cracks, and he clears his throat, eyes locked on Shiro’s skin. “What does it mean?”

“Devotion,” Shiro tells him quietly. “Faithfulness. Loyalty, and the innocence of new love.”

Keith’s hand shakes as he holds it out next to Shiro’s, and for all that Shiro’s expecting it, it’s still a shock to see his own brand new mark’s perfect mate in Keith’s palm. 

Keith bites his lip, and when his eyes find Shiro’s, they’re shiny and raw with hope.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love, uwu. <3
> 
> find me as @zjofierose on all the things

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [among the thorns (the flower soulmark remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26233384) by [sepiacigarettes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sepiacigarettes/pseuds/sepiacigarettes)




End file.
